2012/10/21

Saying no to the boss: Why it's essential

Sometimes, it's impossible to push against powerful people. But
employees often have resources to empower themselves that they may not
recognize.

FORTUNE – We all know the feeling: the boss has given us an
unpleasant task we may not even agree with but ultimately have to
perform. Many times, these orders are essential to making a company run.
But not always. And sometimes they seem plain wrong.

In those cases, companies ultimately benefit when a subordinate
speaks up, according to James Detert, a management professor at
Cornell's Johnson school. But right when their input is needed most,
many employees lose their voice. "In the vast majority of cases where
companies end up with whistleblowing-level disasters, almost always we
can trace them back to an early conversation where somebody tried to
communicate directly up the chain and couldn't or were so afraid to do
so that they let it pile up," he says.Sometimes, it's impossible to push against powerful people. But
employees often have resources to empower themselves that they may not
recognize.

Every whistleblowing-level disaster comes with its unique combination of communication and cultural mishaps. After the 2010 BP oil spill, it came to light that the company had a systemic problem with reporting safety issues up the chain. A rogue trader at UBS (UBS)
is currently on trial in London on charges that he acted illegally when
he made trades that lost the bank over $2 billion in 2011. Yet, he was
probably part of a corporate culture that encouraged risky bets and big
returns.

MORE: 5 ways to make the most of a campus career fairSome organizations penalize staffers for speaking out. At the same
time, plenty of executives claim they want to encourage an "open
culture," Detert says. Managers can take several steps to pull this off,
but in the meantime, there are a couple of ways all employees can
protect themselves from a boss forcing their hand.

The first step is to question the nature of power at work. We may
think power is directly related to job titles, but it's more nuanced
than that. "Power really resides in one's dependence on somebody else,
and their dependence on you in the other direction," says Adam
Kleinbaum, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.
Subordinates can increase their power in a couple of ways, he suggests.
"One is by doing excellent work that makes them completely indispensable
to the manager." The second is to reduce dependence on that manager by
developing a broad network, including peers and mentors. When a manager
makes an ethically gray request, an employee can use his or her allies
as backup to deflect it.

All of us who have bosses could benefit by thinking about the origin
of our ideas about power. Many of us have set beliefs about how
executives and managers behave regardless of how they actually act,
according to a 2011 study co-authored by Detert that was published in
the Academy of Management Journal. After interviewing 190 people
at a tech company, the researchers found that many demonstrated what's
called "implicit" -- or non-evidence-based, yet deep-rooted -- beliefs.
Those included the idea that voicing an opinion different from the
manager's would seem like a challenge to his or her ability, even if
employees had seen evidence to the contrary.

"There seems to be some really silly notion that if we don't all
pretend that managers know more, then the whole hierarchy would all
crumble down," Detert says.

Managers who want to create an open culture first have to work to
overcome how their employees naturally understand power. In fact, people
who consider themselves powerful may unintentionally give off signals
that they aren't open to another perspective, according to a 2012 study
by Professor Shirli Kopelman at the University of Michigan's Ross School
of Business. In the study, participants viewed pictures of deans from
various schools. Without any information about where the deans work,
people said that those from higher-ranked universities seemed less
cooperative than those from lower-ranked universities. Furthermore, when
asked how they would negotiate funding, participants generally said
they would ask for less money from the deans from higher-ranked
universities.

MORE: The robot doctor will see you nowThe upshot, Kopelman suggests, is that highly ranked people might
exude dominance, which others can interpret as a lack of cooperation.

We are probably hard-wired to respond to dominance this way, suggests a 2009 paper published in Research in Organizational Behavior titled "Silenced by fear: The nature, sources and consequences of fear at work."
Humans who could pick up cues from dominant group members had an
advantage over those who couldn't, the report suggests. And modern
humans are raised in hierarchies: parents have more power in families,
and teachers in schools. By the time we enter the workforce, most of us
are conditioned to do what we are told.

Managers aiming to get the best out of their workers have to combat all of this."You have to decrease the perceived risk of speaking up, you have to
increase the perceived rewards of speaking up, and you have to increase
the cost of silence," Detert says. "In other words, you have to be a
company where people would say that the worst thing you could be is be a
'yes man,' " because companies are stronger when employees have the
power to say "no."